©Mat Wright
It is easy to assume that the language of eTwinning is English. A quick first glance inside the community and it appears that English is the lingua franca of the partner finding forums, teachers rooms and the majority of teacher's profiles. Of course the eTwinning portal is available in 24 languages to make it accessible to teachers in their native language but the gut feeling is usually that to interact successfully with other members of the eTwinning community English language skills will get you a long way.
Our colleagues at the Central Support Service for eTwinning wanted to dig deeper under the surface of this interesting issue and ran a poll within the eTwinning Desktop to acertain what languages teachers were using and for what purposes. eTwinners were asked questions about the language of communication used in their projects and also, if the focus of projects was on language learning, what languages are being learnt.
The results are interesting, highlighting "a dynamic linguistic situation" where English is the dominant language of communication in eTwinning but not neccesarily the foremost language learnt within projects.
The full article and analysis of the study is on the eTwinning portal: http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/news/news/what_languages_are_you_learnin.htm.
